[UPDATE! BTBAM have officially announced the tour and all dates on their Facebook page. Thanks to all who emailed us and commented. Looks like it will be hitting several major markets after all; even our constantly neglected readers in Florida get lucky with three dates. -Ed.]

That rumored BTBAM, Animals as Leaders and Tesseract U.S. tour we mentioned a couple weeks go? No longer a rumor! A Facebook event page has popped up promoting a December 9th date with all three bands at the Northern Lights club in Clifton Park, NY (20 miles north of Albany) which would seem to indicate that a surrounding tour is all but certain: bands don’t just book one-offs in fucking Albany, NY. It would also seem to suggest that this tour is going to focus on secondary and tertiary markets, so if these bands always pass by your town in favor of the big city there’s a good chance they’re coming a lot closer to you this time around while us spoiled folk in NYC, L.A., Chicago, Dallas and the like watch enviously from hundreds of miles away (although ya never know.. sometimes routing needs make certain cities indispensable).

Also of note, the Facebook event page and associated show flyer dub this the Saints and Sinners Tour. The last Saints and Sinners Tour, which went out in 2009, featured Hollywood Undead and Senses Fail… so, uh, I’d say this is a big step up for the Saints and Sinners brand!

We’ll post the rest of the tour dates as soon as we have them.

-VN

Thanks: Remo Apuzzo

“Supergroup” is a rough beat; that tag along seems to generate feelings that the sum will never equal the greatness of all its individual parts combined (see: Audioslave, Chickenfoot, Velvet Revolver, etc etc). But when said supergroup is a [comparatively] underground metal band and will be taking their face-fucking music across the country in a dirty, sweaty, fart-filled van, the danger of fan disappointment is automatically diminished. With that in mind, put this lineup in your pipe and smoke it:

Dimitri Minakakis (ex-The Dillinger Escape Plan) – Vocals
John Adubato (ex-Burnt by the Sun) – Guitar
Brett Bamberger (East of the Wall, The Binary Code [touring]) – Bass
Dave Witte (Municipal Waste, ex-Burnt by the Sun, Discordance Axis, Circle of Animals, a million other bands) – Drums

Amirite? We’ve actually known about this project’s super-secret desert bunker jam sessions for some time but had to keep a lid on it while these dudes got their shit tight. The band, called Argonauts, will hopefully be bringing their show on the road very soon.

-VN

With oddball bands like Exivious and T.R.A.M. turning heads in the metal scene over the past couple of years, is experimental jazz becoming the new “it” direction for talenthead metal musicians to move?

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Oh, this makes me miss that kid Revrant so much! Anyone remember him?

ANYWAY, Disturbed are a terrible band, so it’s hard not to perk up when you find out that vocalist David Draiman recently said the following to an Idaho radio station:

“We don’t know what we’re doing… We’re not gonna do our own thing either. This is gonna be the last tour that the American people get to see us in for a while, if not indefinitely. We have some things going on internally, we have some personal things going on. So I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”

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Soon enough you won’t need to watch crappy, fan-filmed sideways footage of the new Animals as Leaders song because you’ll be able to watch awesome, right-side-up, pro-shot footage of it: the band is filming a live DVD on their current tour with Intronaut, Dead Letter Circus, Last Chance to Reason and Evan Brewer. Here’s MS reader Mason K. with a personal account of how he found out about the DVD at this past Saturday’s tour stop:

But the reason for this e-mail (besides to remind all that they should go if they still have a chance), is to reveal (if you have not heard already) that AAL was filming for a Live DVD at the show, and was verified by “God-sent” Abasi.

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The Metalnets are aflutter with today’s news that Megadeth’s Gigantour will return for a fourth run in the summer of 2012 following three years of lying dormant. The travelling festival will feature only one stage (as it did in 2008), as opposed to the two-stage format of the 2005 and 2006 editions. The return of Gigantour after a three year hiatus begs the question: do we really need this?

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The commenters at the official BTBAM message board at SMNnews.com make Lambgoat posters look like friendly little teddybears; the volume and ferocity of childlike name-calling, homophobia / racism / <inserthere-ism>, trolling and pointless arguments are unrivaled on the Metalnets, even if their members do have some really entertaining animated .gifs in their sigs.

In other words, take the following rumor with a heaping, giant, overflowing bowlful of salt: BTBAM are rumored to be planning a fall/winter U.S. tour with TesseracT and Animals as Leaders. The only reason I even give this rumor any attention at all instead of dismissing it as a dreamlike BTBAM fanboy wish is that I have it from a good source that BTBAM are indeed taking TesseracT on tour in the U.S. this fall. With that in mind it certainly makes sense that they’d need one more band to fill out the tour bill, preferably as direct support, as I don’t think TesseracT are quite big enough in the U.S. yet for that role.

So, is this tour gonna happen? Can’t say for certain but it’d sure be cool if it does.

-VN

Thanks: Fuzzy Dunlop

Van Halen, featuring the young squire Van Halen (left); Mark Tremonti (inset)

The reason that Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti is the world’s luckiest guy is not cuz he gets to party with amazing singer Scott Stapp 24/7. Nay, Tremonti is Lord Luckynuts cuz he’s buds with Wolfgang Van Halen, who is the bassist of Van Halen. Which somehow means that Eddie Van Halen, also of Van Halen, trusts Tremonti enough to allow him a live preview of new Van Halen jamz.

Tremonti described Thursday his visit to 5150 (via Van Halen News Desk):

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Tool are notorious for shenanigans and delight in giving their fans tidbits of information while watching them lap it up, parse it in every single way imaginable, and discuss it in the kind of depth usually reserved for biblical debates (guilty). So when Tool posted a missive against failed rapture prophet Harold Camping and his blind followers (sound familiar?) on their comically out-of-date website last week, then followed that with a “personal guarantee” a new Tool album would come out on May 22nd or May 15th, 2012… well, you just hafta wonder.

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So last week we got all excited after hearing some new demos from Josh Travis, guitarist for The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza; the demos sounded pretty TTDTE-esque, so it seemed like a reasonably safe assumption that they might, indeed, be rough versions of songs for the upcoming, presumably-going-to-be-titled Danza IV.

Alas! This is not the case! Reader ZackP personally reached out to the band through their Facebook page to get some clarification, and here’s the response he received:

So that settles that. Too bad, too — those tracks we heard sounded mighty fine.

In any case, the band did enter the studio to record Danza IV last week, so we will get to hear some actual new music from them sometime in the not-too-distant future… and maybe Travis can make a solo album or something, too, so those other tunes find a good home.

-AR

You may agree with MetalSucks stud Axl Rosenberg (pictured here), who expressed today his waning respect for the totally petering-out Judass Priest. He’s right that there’s too much silliness — K.K. Downing’s departure, the half-committal end of major touring (whatever that means), crappy albums like Nostradamus — for all but superfans to maintain any reasonable level of excitement for this, the final act in the Priest saga. Surely, Judass Priest is one of metal’s first and finest; sadly, few tours have less juice than their newly-announced/unpromotable trek with BBQ-core bores Black Label Society and that Thin Lizzy cover band.

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Cheers to those crack investigative reporters over at Heavy Blog is Heavy. They noticed that Josh Travis, guitarist for The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, has been posting some new demos to his Soundcloud page, and that while there’s absolutely no confirmation of this, those demos sound an awful lot like they could be TTDTE material. Now, maybe that’s just Travis’ writing… but as HBIH notes, “It’s not exactly a secret that the band… have been writing,” so it seems entirely feasible that, yes, this is a preview of things to come.

You can check some of the demos here, and the others in the below YouTube clip. Whatever project they’re actually for, they sound extremely promising. Danza III: The Series of Unfortunate Events was like one beard hair away from ending up on my 2010 “Best Of” list, so I am definitely watering at the mouth for whatever the band puts out next.

-AR

So yesterday we learned that vocalist Derek Rydquist is not currently touring Europe with The Faceless, who seem to have recruited a replacement. What’s not clear is who that replacement is, and whether or not he’s a permanent addition to the group’s ranks, or is just filling in while Rydquist deals with visa issues, or family issues, or whatever other issues sometimes prevent musicians from flying overseas with their band. And while it looks like fans are asking “What the dilly, yo?” on The Faceless’ Facelessbook page, answers have yet to be forthcoming.

But the Bob Woodward to my Carl Bernstein, Metal Injection‘s Rob Pasbani, took the baton of great metal journalism and e-mailed Mr. Rydquist directly to get an update. Rydquist’s response?

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I was stumbling around YouTube last night when I came across some new fan-filmed videos of The Faceless on their current European tour with Born of Osiris, Veil of Maya, and Gorod. And I’m sitting there watching some shitty cell phone footage of the band performing their new song, “The Eidelon Reality” (listen to a pre-production demo of the track here), and I have this realization –

Hey, that ain’t Derek Rydquist doin’ the vocals.

And so I scrolled down to look at the comments where, indeed, some other dude has asserted “that doesnt look like the vocalist,” and the dude who filmed the above video responded, “I think they got a new one and he´s much better than the old vocalist.”

So, trying to be a good detective, I went over to the band’s Facebook page to see if Rydquist had been removed from their listed line-up. And as of this writing, he hasn’t.

But there is this comment on their wall from some fan who saw them in Plymouth last night:

“incredible tonight, tight as fuck but wheres derek? had no idea he was no longer in the band, never the less the new guy did a stellar job”

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I heard about, and then completely ignored, this photo album of Mastodon recording their new album. Why did I completely ignore it? Because I’ve seen bands record albums. It looks like dudes standing in a studio playing instruments. And unless you’re dealing with a band who haven’t recorded together in a very, very, very long time, well… that’s not too exciting. So these kinds of shots in and of themselves are usually not very cool.

Well, I’m an idiot. If I had looked, I might have seen this pic of Dave Grohl in the studio with the band:

Instead, I had to read about it on Heavy Blog is Heavy. D’oh!

ANYWAY, let us now analyze this photograph into, ahem, oblivion.

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I’m sure this is the exact scenario Axl and Vince dreaded when they left me in charge of the MetalSucks Mansion today. While they’re out plotting world domination, a press release came flying into my overly stuffed inbox from our good friend, Amy Sciarretto, PR goddess of Roadrunner Records.

The subject matter in question? The naming of the new drummer for “prog-rock” (their words) band, and perennial Vince Neilstein favorite, Dream Theater.

The Roadrunner press release states:

“Go to Dream Theater’s Facebook page on Thursday, April 21st at 11 AM to sign up for the mailing list and to receive more details about an exclusive and intimate look at the auditions, and to find out exactly when and how the momentous announcement about the band’s new lineup will be made.  Fans will be able to find out information about the band’s upcoming 2011 World Tour via Facebook, as well.”

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UPDATE: It’s official. Nevermore are off this tour. WHAT A BUMMER.

Well, here’s a potentially sucky situation.

We just got the following e-mail from reader Glenn Pillsbury:

“Just got a canned email from the promoter of the May 8 Symphony X concert in San Francisco that does not mention anything about Nevermore appearing on the dates, even though Nevermore was on the dates when I purchased my ticket a few weeks ago.  I sent a reply asking about it and got a statement from the promoter guy himself that Nevermore has indeed dropped off.  Haven’t seen anything from Nevermore itself though (their MySpace still has all the dates listed).”

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I still get chills watching this.

Alice In Chains announced this morning that they’d be making a “special concert announcement” on Monday, April 11th. What could this special concert be? Allow me to recklessly speculate, ’cause that’s what we do here at MS:

• The first place my mind went was “Unplugged Redux.” Alice In Chains Unplugged is a definite Desert Island 5 album for me, and the accompanying video is absolutely chilling… to say it was a legendary performance would be an understatement. A second unplugged show would be a fitting tribute to Layne Staley, who died 9 years ago yesterday.
• Some other kind of tribute to Layne Staley and/or recently deceased original bassist Mike Starr. Good god, 50% of the original AIC lineup is dead. WTF?
• A premiere or announcement of the release of the 3D concert they filmed last October in Seattle.
• They’re headlining Lollapalooza 2011.

That’s all I got… any other ideas?

Share your memories of Layne in the comments.

-VN

Props to Heavy Blog is Heavy for catching this interesting update from Sumerian Records’ official Facebook page:

As HBiH notes, this sounds like it’s going to be a release (or releases) in the vein of Roadrunner United and Nuclear Blast All-Stars — basically a “who’s who” team-up of musicians signed to the label. Those offerings actually ended up being, by and large, pretty cool (I mean, of course there were some missteps, but I don’t look back at those albums and think, “Well, that was ill-advised”), and Sumerian’s current roster is one of the strongest in metal (The Faceless, Animals as Leaders, Periphery, Veil of Maya, After the Burial, etc., pretty much make up for their creatively vapid bands like Asking Alexandria and Upon a Burning Body), so it makes sense that they’d wanna do something like this.

Question is… what form, exactly, will it take? I almost don’t care, as long as Bizzy Bone is involved. Hey, it could happen.

-AR

If you were hoping for a new Converge full-length this year, well, don’t hold your breath. In a recent status update, the band said that “no date is ready to announce yet,” but I heard through the grapevine that when said date comes, it won’t be for 2011. Now, sometimes the grapevine is wrong, of course, but… yeah, I wouldn’t be shocked if we didn’t get a proper follow-up to Axe To Fall until 2012.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the band has just announced summer headlining tours of both the U.S. and Europe, and that they’ve got some other goodies in the works to tide fans over until we do finally get a new album — namely, a split 7″ with Drop Dead that the band hopes “to be available at the U.S. shows” starting in May, plus a new DVD, which is currently be editing and, “If the Hard Drive Gods smile on us,” will be out this year.

So, there ya have it. If we really aren’t gonna get a new Converge release in 2011, at least the band is coming up with plenty of ways to keep us entertained.

Here are those tour dates:

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